Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Paradigms and Serial Entrepreneurs: The Language of Business

There are certain words and phrases that creep into the
business lexicon. At first they’re
clear, useful, and appropriate, but, squeezed beyond their means, become burdensome
and hackneyed.

Paradigm is a word like that, and more especially, paradigm
shift. When I first heard it in 1980 or
so it was like hearing “weltanschauung” for the first time in high school: It was so cool we tried to fit it into every conversation (as in "that new Three Dog Night song upended my weltanschauung"). So, too, with paradigm shift. Pretty soon, every time someone launched a
new product, reorganized a department, or entered a new market, they were
shifting paradigms. It got to be silly.

“Crossing the chasm,” itself a highly useful
concept, became so clichéd by 2004 that I had a Board member once tell me I’d
be fired if I ever blamed a missed budget on not being able to “cross the chasm.” (He’d heard that excuse in his last three board
meetings.) At that very moment I struck the phrase forever from my business vocabulary.

In my early years we were always sticking to the knitting. Then I was working to improve my business from
good to great. Recently, as you know,
everything wanted to be free (making it, I might add, very difficult to make
budget). And it's extraordinarily rare when I visit a company that I don't hear at least one tech guy described as a genius, or a rock star.

Today, lean and lean start-up are headed the way of the
paradigm shift. They are used everywhere
ad nauseum and, most recently, are now applied every time a half-baked product gets rejected by the market.

A
month ago my alma mater informed me that the “Lean Start-up Changes Everything”;
I have not had my weltanschauung so disrupted since Three Dog Night. The truth is, like all good ideas, the lean
start-up recipe is right for some businesses in some markets some of the
time. (Ask a medical device manufacturer
to place a “minimum viable product” with doctors and patients, or a consumer
goods company to launch a “pretty good cereal” with shoppers.) In the old days we called the lean start-up a "ready, fire, aim" strategy.

Likewise, disrupt has now taken the place of most every
action verb in business. We used to
launch a service; now we disrupt a market.
A recent grad once wanted to do marketing, or finance, or write code, or
maybe build a cool product; now he or she wants to disrupt an industry. Every time we redesign a website we are being
disruptive. Every time we meet in convention we disrupt. Truly, we might give this
poor word a rest.

And then, of course, there is the most pretentious word in
business: serial. I am not just an
entrepreneur, I am a serial entrepreneur. (Not just an angel, mind you, an archangel.)

If a pilot has 1,000 successful flights, perfect take-off
and landing each time, and works for five airlines plus the military during his
career, he is just a pilot. If a teacher teaches every day for 40 years
in six school districts, he is still only a teacher. But, if I am involved in just two start-ups,
at almost any level, I can claim the title of serial entrepreneur. The start-ups don’t even have to be successful—in
fact, the fastest way to serialhood is a failure or two.

It was a bad day when “entrepreneur” went from being an
occasional activity (as Schumpeter imagined) to a full-blown, 24x7, LinkedIn occupation. But it became an unpleasant paradigm shift when it went serial.